" People in Western countries don't realize how bad the situation on the ground actually is¹; random Ukrainian flags showing up on your work monitor can result in severe problems for you (like losing you job, or worse), especially if you work in the government sector. If they show up on your laptop in a random cafe or an airport, you might very well get a beating from one of many "war heroes" that walk around the cities these days.
No, the government sector doesn't just make missiles and bombs, it also covers schools, hospitals, many other things."
> Russ Allbery agreed that the DFSG was not relevant; he also warned that citing the Social Contract and DFSG ""turns the conversation into rules lawyering without addressing the actual issue"". However, even though xsnow is DFSG-compliant, he did say that the flag display may be something Debian does not want in its archives:
> > I would, in general, say that software that behaves in deceptive ways, which includes hidden behavior changes based on usernames, locales, or other local settings or information that no user would reasonably expect to change behavior in this way is probably not something that we want to have in Debian. It's a very slippery slope and also likely to create a lot of drama to very little benefit.
As if it's so fucking easy to denounce a dictator who has murderous tendencies and who rules your homeland, as if it's so easy to insult him, and then what, not be able to return home and see your friends and family until that dictator is defeated?
I found those demands so unthinkingly heartless, it's responding to tyranny with your own tyranny...
I believe upstream is here, and has the same code as quoted:
https://sourceforge.net/p/xsnow/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/xsnow/src/scenery.c#l332
if (global.Language && !strcmp(global.Language,"ru") && drand48() < 0.3)
tt = MAXTREETYPE;Shit like this erodes trust.
Discrimination implies something harmful. Like invading neighbor country and perpetrating genocide. This complaint says more about Ivanov than anything else.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48734373
Further LWN commentary (as observed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48736518) is that the result would not be solely drama but potentially some fairly nasty real world consequences for some people.
The idea that some govt employee would get fired for this is extremely far fetched.
I do not own any popular software to put anti Zed/Putin shit in it so sorry I can inconvinience those super rare good Russians.
My family speaks both Ukrainian and Russian, and in Russian speaking spaces here in California we find many many many eager supporters of Ukraine's sovereignty, because when they hear Ukrainian spoken they tell us! And also tell us they wish they had been able to keep their non-Russian family language alive too. Most of these supporters are not from the Moscow or St. Petersburg areas though...
I wouldn't get bent out of shape if Xsnow showed me a Canadian/Greenlandic flag in response to me using en-us.
Will anyone think of the poor Russians just trying to go on with their lives?
Do people in Russia realize how bad the situation is on the ground for Ukrainians?
>No, the government sector doesn't just make missiles and bombs, it also covers schools, hospitals, many other things.
Schools forming future soldiers, hospitals healing soldiers so that they can go back to the front...
The naivety here is astounding. The commenter, those who agree with him and all "normal" Russians would benefit to read Hannah Arendt:
https://philosophybreak.com/articles/hannah-arendt-on-standi...
Cue the famous quote...
> People in Western countries don't realize how bad the situation on the ground actually is; random Ukrainian flags showing up on your work monitor can result in severe problems for you (like losing you job, or worse), especially if you work in the government sector. If they show up on your laptop in a random cafe or an airport, you might very well get a beating from one of many "war heroes" that walk around the cities these days.
[EDIT: I see @krunck reposted this at the top level — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48736518]
And yes, it is their, not their government, not some mysterious leaders. Russians reelected same government for 35 years with it invading neighbours pretty much every 5 years.
Then there's the question of singling out some subset of Debian users based on their country, for different behavior they presumably don't want and that is against their individual interests (see the other comment, about displaying a flag getting you beaten).
The solution is to treat everyone fairly and honestly, and to set an example for how people can get along. Imagine Debian is an international space station: the astronauts will help each other, not bicker and backstab. There are other venues for conflicts.
So it's "selective degradation of functionality" based entirely on your assumptions regarding the motivations of the users? How is this a useful description?
https://nestcentre.org/what-russians-think-about-the-war-aga...
> For most ordinary Russians, the war is not a central concern. This may sound cynical, but it’s the truth.
> When they do think about it, they tend to view it much like the weather: something that one may or may not like, but which lies beyond individual control and to which one simply adapts.
I admire a friend of mine in London who every weekend went to anti-genocide rallies in London. But at the same time I can imagine it's excruciating work, yelling and protesting and not saving any single Palestinian child's life. Meanwhile in Russia, protesting will get you arrested and probably be sent to the frontline (as a man) or prison (as a woman). Given those choices, would you also not say "Well, I can be angry and depressed about the Ukranians (and my fellow countrymen forced to fight the war) being killed, or I can just go about my day and put this exhausting thought aside"...
Meanwhile in America, there's a political party using the Nazi playbook to subvert democracy and succeeding. Are you American? Are you doing everything to stop that, or do you see yourself powerless and so you go about your day and put that exhausting thought aside?
Eh, you'd be wrong. It's a different issue in the US, half the population believe and vote for nonsense, the other half are strongly against it.
> What proof do you have, or do you "just know it"?
Friends with Russians, and try to read useful sources like Meduza. It's absolutely very much the case that most of that population are brainwashed and believe the state propaganda.
> Meanwhile in Russia, protesting will get you arrested and probably be sent to the frontline (as a man) or prison (as a woman).
Yes, so an armed uprising is necessary if voting is not an option. But if there is no will, there will be no effort.
> Meanwhile in America, there's a political party using the Nazi playbook to subvert democracy and succeeding.
America will still have elections, and we won't have to deal with our Putin-wannabe again after their term is up.
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The xsnow application, which generates an animated snowfall effect (and other pleasant diversions) for X11 desktops, does not seem like an obvious channel for political statements. Nevertheless, xsnow's maintainer seems to have included a political protest in the program: an Easter egg that is triggered when the program's language is set to Russia ("ru"). One user has complained that this functionality should be removed from the Debian xsnow package, but Debian does not seem to have any rules that forbid such a feature outright.
On June 14, Alexander Ivanov sent a message to Debian's development list to complain that if a user's language settings were set to Russian, it would trigger "a disguised visual element (Ukrainian flags labeled as 'EXTRATREE') with a significantly higher probability". The code is found in the src/scenery.c file beginning on line 326 in xsnow 3.8.3, the version packaged for Debian 13 ("trixie") and in 3.8.6, which is in unstable:
#ifdef USE\_EXTRATREE
if (global.Language && !strcmp(global.Language,"ru") && drand48() < 0.3)
tt = MAXTREETYPE;
if (drand48() < 0.02)
tt = MAXTREETYPE;
#endif
Xsnow is more likely to display Ukrainian flags (src/Pixmaps/extratree.xpm) if the language is set to Russian. Xsnow allows users to pick from one of several languages; when the application was set to English, I did not see any Ukrainian flags but they should pop up about 2% of the time. I did see the expected decorations such as a moon, snow, trees, polar bears, birds, and Santa with his sleigh. After I changed the language setting to Russian, xsnow immediately placed several flags on the desktop along with the other decorations. The screenshot below shows what this looks like on Debian 13.
Ivanov claimed that the behavior violated the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) that are part of the project's Social Contract. Specifically, he said that the "targeted behavior" violated the principles of no discrimination against persons or groups (DFSG #5) and no discrimination against fields of endeavor (DFSG #6).
Ivanov had not filed a bug, but was, instead reporting the problem to "the wider Debian development community". He said he took that route because the maintainer of the Debian package, Willem Vermin, is also the maintainer of the xsnow project and had been the one to introduce the change in the first place.
Chris Hofstaedtler replied that Ivanov was mistaken; the DFSG does not require that the software is non-discriminatory, but that the license for the software is. "The licenses in use do not appear to violate the DFSG's points 5 or 6. Please read the DFSG carefully next time." Xsnow is primarily licensed under the GPLv3, though some files carry other Debian-approved licenses.
Russ Allbery agreed that the DFSG was not relevant; he also warned that citing the Social Contract and DFSG "turns the conversation into rules lawyering without addressing the actual issue". However, even though xsnow is DFSG-compliant, he did say that the flag display may be something Debian does not want in its archives:
I would, in general, say that software that behaves in deceptive ways, which includes hidden behavior changes based on usernames, locales, or other local settings or information that no user would reasonably expect to change behavior in this way is probably not something that we want to have in Debian. It's a very slippery slope and also likely to create a lot of drama to very little benefit.
Ivanov said that he understood the point that xsnow did not violate the DFSG. But, he asked, shouldn't its hidden functionality be treated as a bug or behavior that should be patched out "to restore the application's neutral and intended functionality for all users equally?" Bill Allombert suggested that he open a bug report, since the Debian development list was not the correct venue for the complaint.
To date, Ivanov has not opened a bug report, and the conversation seems to have run its course. I have emailed Vermin to ask if he was aware of the complaint, and if he would be willing to roll back the Ukrainian flag display if a bug were filed. So far, I have not received a response.
Even though Vermin may not want to change xsnow's behavior, Debian package maintainers have been required to make changes for technical reasons—or have had packages removed from the archive for offensive content. In August 2025, two "offensive" fortune packages were removed ahead of the trixie release following a lengthy discussion. In October 2025, Debian's Technical Committee decided that an upstream systemd change would need to be reverted because the new behavior broke a number of programs that depended on a world-writable /run/lock directory. In each case, there was a fair bit of discussion and deliberation before the maintainers were overridden.
This is not to argue one way or the other whether xsnow's Easter egg should be removed; it is simply worth pointing out that it is not futile to file a bug against a package even if it's likely that the maintainer will disagree. As a project, Debian gives its developers a wide latitude in how they manage their packages, but a packager's decisions can be overridden on the rare occasions when the project deems it necessary. Convincing the project to do so, however, requires the petitioner to put in the work. Merely complaining on the mailing list is unlikely to achieve any results.